


The Temple of Thoth

by thedevilchicken



Category: Under Bergets Rot - Finntroll (Music Video)
Genre: Ancient Egypt, Gen, Magic, Monsters, Mummies, Music, Transfiguration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6997996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sits in her flowerpot and she watches the world go by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Temple of Thoth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertScribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/gifts).



She sits in her flowerpot and she watches the world go by.

It's baffling sometimes. There were no cars or flatscreen televisions or mobile phones with 4G internet connections back when she was living; they had chariots and storytellers and papyrus rolls that scribes wrote on with brushes dipped in pigment and then shipped up and down the Nile in boats with sails and oars. The modern day is baffling but she doesn't miss her time and honestly, she doesn't even really miss her country, with Re's scorching midday sun that blazed up in the sky each day. He seems paler here, and colder, in the north where she lives now, and the great white baboon in the mansion of the moon seems all the brighter for it. It feels like she's closer to Thoth than she ever was, and that pleases her. It's ironic that she's had to come all this long way for that, considering where she lived her life before. 

She sits in her flowerpot and she watches the people arrive. 

Some of them come to the bar to gawk, but that's okay - their money's as good as anyone else's so as long as they're drinking they're just as good for business. She understands the bar's finances though in her time the world worked differently: people traded goods for goods, goods for services or the other way around, and precious metals didn't have a person's profile stamped into their flattened, rounded surfaces. She remembers how workers in the temple where she lived were paid from the offerings once Thoth had eaten from the spirit of them, masons and _wab_ priests and scribes taking bread and fruit and bolts of linen or pots of lumpy, bready beer they had to drink through filters. The beer's better now, she thinks, even if she still hates the smell of it. And she wasn't paid, of course: living in the temple complex, she had everything she'd ever need. 

Some people come to gawk and peer around the bar with wide, awed eyes. Some see her in her flowerpot and make a beeline for her, like she's a mysterious novelty that's only there for them to take obnoxious, half-drunk selfies with. Often they move straight on after that to bigger and better things - they've seen mummies before, if not mummies that move - but sometimes they linger and try to strike up conversation. She speaks to them in her own language, her native one that not even the occasional visiting Egyptologist can fully understand, and usually they tire of it quickly and wander off in search of noxious green booze. Sometimes they wrap her up in a scarf and hat and put gloves on her bones like a snowman and she hops about, annoyed, till Vreth comes down from the stage and helps her out of them. Sometimes, when she's sitting by the red velvet curtain that hangs in the doorway and the chilly winter wind close in, she leave the borrowed knitwear where it is and bops to the music in it, cosy. Maybe she'll have the goat barman knit her a jumper, she thinks, though how he'll hold the needles with his hooves is another matter. 

Her old home was never really cold. She lived in the temple precinct in a dormitory with the other girls, the singers and the dancers and musicians of Thoth, some of them lesser daughters of noblemen just like she was. Her eldest sister had been married to a noble down the river in the delta and sometimes at night she dread of her, sailing the place where the Nile swept into the Great Green on her husband's barge, skirting the bustling port with all its multitudinous arrivals and departures, its traders and its markets, foreign smells that would linger in the air day and night. Her sister would lie on a couch on the deck under a canopy that fluttered in the cool sea breeze and she'd watch the world go by, but the closest Maatkare ever got to the sea in life was the banks of the Nile where Sobek's crocodiles lurked or the temple's sacred lake where the women weren't allowed to go. 

She went to the sacred lake, of course. Even in the service of her god, she couldn't help but feel the rules were there for breaking. She supposes that's what got her into so much trouble.

She sits in her flowerpot and watches the band play their songs. 

There was music under the mountain, but it was nothing like she'd ever heard before. She'd always enjoyed music and she'd always been quite skilled at it back then, when she'd still had arms to play, and so she'd plucked the lyre for Thoth and not just rattled the sistrum like the other girls. She lay there in her linen bandages that stuck to her natron-parched skin because back then she couldn't move, and she listened to it, straining her dead ears. She heard the pulse of it, strains discordant as metal on rock, like the bronze teeth of tools in the Nubian mines where all the temple's gold had come from. It lulled her to sleep just like the priests had promised her would never happen; she was meant to lie there conscious and unmoving, buried deep at the mountain's root. But the mountain's strong vines grew through her, grew into her, and she slept without a single dream.

She woke when they found her, the mountain's song disrupted by their hammers and their shouts, but she couldn't move to see who it was who'd come. She felt their hands there pulling at her, felt the stirring of dry old air about her, and then there was the light and the heat of the sun outside that rushed up to replace the dark and the chill of her tomb. They weren't sure what to do with her, it seemed, just another mummy albeit from the most unlikely source there in the hills, and so they sold her, and those people sold her, and _those_ people sold her until one language became another became another and the climate changed along with it, cooling. But Thoth is the god of language. Thoth is _her_ god. 

The band plays music that's like nothing she ever heard when she was living. She likes the way it sounds, though, each time she remembers the first time, once they'd brought her there to their rundown club and sat her in her little terracotta pot, planted her there like a flower to see if her twisted vines would grow, a little Egyptian mummy plant, a curio. She remembers how their music tickled at her mummified heart and then, after a couple of weeks of water and song, she finally opened up her dusty eyes. The instruments she saw were rather strange but the sound they made amazed her, and when they saw her swaying with it on the windowsill, they stopped abruptly. They stared at her, though she supposes that was understandable, and she made a muffled sound and wobbled her vines in their direction, trying not to topple to the floor in a heap of soil and broken pot and bandages. 

Then, after a bewildered parlay with his bandmates, the singer - she knew even then that his name was Vreth - went across the room to her; he took a pair of secateurs and clipped open the stitches that ran jaggedly across her mouth. 

"Hello," she said, once the stitches were gone. "Please don't stop, you're very good!"

Vreth recoiled. The drummer laughed, and then they all did, clapping each other on the back as she smiled from her spot on the windowsill. Then they played again and she enjoyed it just as much as she had before, except when they finished she could tell them so.

The doors open at 7pm every night of the week with a sweep of the red velvet curtain as the bright lights pop into life on their sign outside. They operate within the law, strictly speaking, with a licence in place for the club and for the strange green alcohol they serve, and they're actually quite considerate toward their neighbours: the music isn't really all that loud by what she understands of modern standards and they wind down for the night well before they're legally obliged to, well before dawn, sometime around midnight. The people in the flats that line the street they're in complained in the beginning, but crime's gone down and business is up and okay, yes, so they're still not great fans of bumping into lumbering green monsters in the supermarket buying cheese or rubbing elbows with four-legged dancers in the newsagent's over celeb gossip magazines, though it's all peaceable enough. They all came to terms in an odd district meeting, with a kind of entente cordiale that's lasted for the past couple of years and shows no signs of shaking yet. Apparently, they're good for the local economy. 

She sits in her flowerpot and watches the people buzz around her. And then they want to change, they come to her. 

Sometimes people just come in to gawk and that's fine, it really is. It's good for the profit margins if nothing else, when people come from far and wide to see the band and stare slack-jawed at all the strange people working there, or drinking there. They never seem quite sure if the bartender started out as a goat or a man and he doesn't like to confirm either way but he was the first one she changed, one night in the bar not long after her arrival, once the doors were closed. They'd been talking for hours every night for weeks. 

"I can do things, you know," she told him that night, in her flowerpot that was stationed on the bar by then. "I can make you different, if you like." 

He was hesitant but she could tell he was excited. He nodded his head. She thought the change suited rather well. The horns are very fetching.

The band were next and they loved her work, and the instruments she made for them. And once the furore had died down, once the police had been called about the monsters in the bar and the scientists and doctors were satisfied that perhaps it wasn't strictly speaking possible but there they were despite that, once she'd fended off all threats of scalpels and samples and carbon dating, they reopened the club and watched the people pour in.  
When people want to change, they come to her. She was changed herself, once, long ago. But that wasn't exactly by choice. 

Her father was a gubernatorial bigwig in Hermopolis Magna, though they didn't really call it that back then, not unless they were Greek and she wasn't, they weren't. She was thoroughly Egyptian and she supposes she still is, though she's argued with itinerant Egyptologists ten times over whether _Kemet_ meant _black land_ or land of black people or something else entirely, so now she's cut them off and corresponds entirely by email if and when the mood strikes. Which is surprisingly difficult when you have vines instead of arms, so she thinks she does quite well for herself. She likes the internet: it's full of cat pictures, for one, and email is a genuinely fantastic thing. She thinks Thoth would have approved of all the writing. 

Her father was good buddies with the pharaoh though the man himself didn't exactly visit often. She remembers seeing the scribes when she was younger, taking down dictation on papyrus rolls that they shipped down the Nile to Pi-Ramesses where the pharaoh lived. Her brothers went to school to learn to write but she, third daughter of a state official, was packed off to the temple. She probably wouldn't have learned to read anyway, she thinks; they weren't exactly hot on literate girls back then. 

She remembers how excited she was then, ten years old and being sent to serve their god, but at the same time it was odd, leaving home, going into the temple with all the priests and priestesses. Of course, they weren't really priestesses - there hadn't been priestesses of Thoth for hundreds of years by then, just dancers, musicians. But she liked music, she always had and she was quite skilled at it back then when she still had arms, and so she played the lyre for Thoth and not just the sistrum like the other girls. 

She'd been there for a year, living in the temple grounds but barely ever setting foot inside the temple proper, when she started sneaking in there past the guards. They slept at night, full of beer they drank through filters to keep out the gritty bread they brewed it with, and even though she hates the smell of it she has to admit that modern beer looks ten times less disgusting. They slept though they were meant to be on watch and she slipped past them, treading the shadows round the courtyard's edge once she'd gone in past the pylon. For the first few times she just stood there in front of the next closed door but then she pushed and pushed till they opened just wide enough for her to let herself into the big dark hall beyond. 

She wasn't meant to be there, in the flickering light of the linen wicks dipped into saucers of oil they mixed with salts to keep them from smoking. She wasn't meant to slip between the massive stone columns all carved like blossoming papyrus reeds with flowers at their huge, tall heads. She knew she was breaking the rules, that only the priests were allowed in there, but she liked the painted carvings on the walls, scenes of kings who made offerings of _ma'at_ , of justice and truth and universal order, to their ibis-headed god, to Thoth who'd created language and writing and the magic that she knows springs from that. But she didn't understand the words, of course, because just like so many others she'd never been taught to.

She sneaked in maybe every third night for months, at least as her people conceived them at the time, three ten-day weeks to each of their twelve thirty-day months that ran into five festival days before the cycle continued. It was _shemu_ then, the harvest season, the summer season, hot and dry even there by the banks of the Nile, and when she was caught, as was more or less inevitable, she told the head priest on her knees in the courtyard dust that she only wanted to see if she could teach herself to understand because that was really all she wanted. She wanted to know Thoth. 

"You're not meant to understand," he said, stern-faced as ever, but later on, in the evening, the fourth god's servant of Thoth came to find her in the dormitory she shared with the other girls. 

"We'll start your training tomorrow, Maatkare," he said. 

The name of the fourth god's servant of Thoth was Djehutynakht, _Thoth is strong_ , which seemed strangely apt. He took her to the temple courtyard in the morning once they were both clean enough to enter there, once they'd scrubbed themselves pure, and he showed her the name of their god on the walls, the symbols to look for, the little ibis with its crescent moon beak. He told her to scour the walls and count how many times she saw it by marking a line on a slate that he gave her, that she carried here and there in her still-small hands. It took hours, standing there in the growing heat, craning her neck to see higher and higher, but she counted them all, every last one. Her god was everywhere. She understood.

"Don't make me regret this," said Djehutynakht, as he sat down with his slate to teach her how to write the word she'd counted out so many times. 

"I won't," she replied, and she sat down at his side. At the time, she thinks she even meant it; if she did, she didn't mean it for very long at all. She's always thought that rules were there for breaking.

Seven long years passed and every day she learned voraciously. She thinks perhaps they should have known better than to teach her.

On the slow nights, they play slow songs. She likes them just as much as their jauntier tunes but they remind her more of temple music - singing for Thoth was always more like a cathedral choir than a barroom band and when the volume decreases and the beat dials down, she wonders if maybe some of what she remembers has worked its way into them. She remembers the music they were playing that night, when they found her in the temple sanctuary amongst the open scrolls. She remembers the music they played then they dragged her out and beat her, when they held her down and her old teacher, Djehutynakht, showed her just how strong Thoth was. They sewed shut her mouth so she couldn't speak and they took her arms just so she couldn't unpick the stitches. No sistrums were played to pacify their god, no chantresses sang, there was just the sound of a far-off lyre, a song she didn't know. 

They killed her that night but she didn't die. After everything she'd read, she couldn't. 

On the slow nights, Vreth picks up her flowerpot between songs and the band take her upstairs and then upstairs again till they're outside on the roof beneath the stars. She looks up and she smiles at the baboon in the moon, her god, god of knowledge, god of wisdom, god of magic, god of fate, and she wonders if he always knew what her fate would be, if he wrote it on the brick she was birthed on, that she'd live to see the ending of the world. 

When people want to change, they come to her. She's happy to oblige.

Over the years there in the temple, she read the forty-two books of Thoth that he'd given to his priests so long before. At night she'd sneak out of her room and leave the other girls behind, she'd swim in the sacred lake under the moon till she was sure she was just as pure as any of the priests were and then dry herself on borrowed linens and steal in past the sleeping guards. He sneaked into the courtyard, skirted shadows in the columned hall, worked up the courage night on night to open up that final door and step into Thoth's innermost sanctuary. She found the shrine there, the one the god's statue lived inside and she went down on her knees each night to say how sorry she was for being there, except she knew she wasn't sorry for that at all. Thoth didn't seem to mind; on the sixth night, the light shifted and reflected off the gilded door of the cabinet where the scrolls were kept. She took it as a sign. She began to read.

Forty-two scrolls took time to read. They took three years, three long years of sneaking here and there and kneeling on the sanctuary floor, each book leading into the next till her knowledge was perfect. When she finished, she understood why no one priest was permitted to read them all; the night them found her, she finally knew how the world was made and how to alter it. The shame of it is that she just can't alter herself. 

When she died, her heart was not weighed against the feather of ma'at and Thoth did not record the judgement, because no judgement was ever made. She likes to think ma'at requires a little chaos in the balance. She likes to think Thoth would approve. After all, she's made this bar his temple, a house of magic, a house of truth. 

She sits in her flowerpot and she watches the world go by, like her sister did aboard her boat so many years ago; she watches the people arrive and she wonders who amongst them might like to make a change tonight. She can see into their hearts just as clearly as her god might ever have, sees who and what they want to be. She can make that happen.

What the priests never seemed to see was that her plans were never all that grand. She never wanted power; she never wanted much of anything except to understand, and now she does. 

The band plays, and she thinks music is a language, too. 

The band plays. And she's happy in her flowerpot.


End file.
